I

After Johnson had settled down to work with Cave, he’d echo the lament in Ecclesiastes 12:12, “of making many books there is no end,” and complain about the “epidemical conspiracy for the destruction of paper.” Yet, desperate to be recognized in the mass of print, he had to write unceasingly, both under his own name and anonymously. He tried his hand at every genre: translations, poetry, book reviews, parliamentary debates, periodical essays, literary criticism, Oriental fables, political pamphlets, biographies, letters, a verse tragedy, a travel book, even medical prescriptions. Despite his enormous output, Johnson actually suffered from writer’s block. He had an inner compulsion to write and at the same time a disabling anxiety about writing itself.

When he finally got down to writing, his anxiety about the specific task was compounded with a sense of guilt about not writing enough, not practicing his craft. “He that has already trifled away those months and years, in which he should have laboured,” he wrote in Rambler 71, “must remember that he has now only a part of that of which the whole is little; and that since the few moments remaining are to be considered as the last trust of heaven, not one is to be lost.”¹ He felt his God-given talent, “the trust of heaven,” was (in Milton’s words) “death to hide.” He experienced the deathlike inertia of depression and tortured himself with the fear that he was betraying his high purpose in life.

Johnson never completely dispelled his block, but learned how to deal with it. Once aroused from his characteristic indolence, he wrote with astonishing speed and insight, and from the beginning to the end of his career he was continually in demand. The process of writing is the subject of his greatest work, The Lives of the Poets; the sorrows of literary life appear in his two major poems, London and The Vanity of Human Wishes. Johnson’s work constantly addresses the paradox of writer’s block: the inability to work and the absolute necessity to do so. A great teacher, Johnson described the techniques he used to overcome procrastination and spur himself to work; he gave practical tips on how to get ideas, edit and revise; and with moral exhortation he urged writers to persevere to the end.

One source of his anxiety was his acute sense of the disparity between intention and execution, between what he’d hoped to achieve and the disappointing result. Infallibly pessimistic, Johnson was never satisfied with his work. His perennial sluggishness originated in this striving for perfection. As he explained to Hester Thrale, “he had never worked willingly in his Life Man or Boy nor ever did fairly make an Effort to do his best except three Times whilst he was at School.” The fear of failure prevented him from completing or even starting a book. He had inscribed in Greek on his pocket watch the admonition from John 9:4: “the night cometh” when no man can work. In his life of Pope he mentioned “indolence, interruption, business, and pleasure” as impediments to literary work.² He discussed this issue, which preyed on his mind, in several of the essays in the Idler and the Rambler. He observed that when writers attempt to complete a piece of work, they are often paralyzed by fear. The mind is so often filled “with anxiety, that an habitual dislike steals upon us, and we shrink involuntarily from the remembrance of our task.” Even if they summon up the energy to complete it, they are often overcome by a period of exhaustion that prevents further effort: “any uncommon exertion of strength, or perseverance in labour, is succeeded by a long interval of languor and weariness.” Johnson’s inability to complete a piece of writing made him feel that time was running out and often led to thoughts of futility and death: “procrastination is accumulated on procrastination, and one impediment succeeds another, till age shatters our resolution, or death intercepts the project of amendment.”³

Johnson made writing sound so wretched, so full of mental anguish, that it’s surprising he ever wanted to be an author. But he took satisfaction in the life of the mind and pride in his growing reputation. Early on, he discovered how to engage in literary work by accepting commissions from publishers rather than trying to generate ideas of his own. His early writing, completed in his twenties, was slow and laborious. He could scarcely face the task of translating Jerónimo Lobo’s Voyage to Abyssinia and did the absolute minimum. His play Irene, his most elaborately planned and extensively revised work, took two years to write and was his most notable failure.

Johnson always required external stimuli to write—the stick of a deadline or the carrot of money. His arrest on two occasions for debt and the imminent threat of prison were, he found, a great spur to composition. He proceeded with habitual delay and characteristically sluggish resolution, dragging his feet but pressing forward. Since writing was painful and difficult, he considered financial rewards (however modest) an essential motivation. In one of his most famous pronouncements, Johnson, exaggerating for rhetorical effect, exclaimed, “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.” Though he never dedicated his own work to anyone, the “blockhead” himself often wrote, free of charge, many prefaces and dedications—as well as advertisements, lines of poetry, chapters of novels, election speeches, legal briefs, law lectures, sermons, pleas for mercy and epitaphs—for close friends and deserving acquaintances who needed help or money. Loyalty to friends and appeals to his charity would immediately set him to work.

Despite his own mental struggles with writing, Johnson believed that it was above all a craft and maintained that a man could write “at any time, if he will set himself doggedly to do it.” He criticized the poet Thomas Gray for his peculiar belief that he could compose only “at certain times, or at happy moments; a fantastic foppery” to which a man of learning and virtue should have been superior. Yet Johnson conceded that magical spurts of poetic inspiration could sometimes occur spontaneously—an unexpected benefit from getting down to the job. He noted “the lucky moments of animated imagination . . . those felicities which cannot be reproduced at will by wit and labour, but must arise unexpectedly in some hour propitious to poetry,” and the influence exerted “by the causes wholly out of the performer’s power, by hints of which he perceives not the origin, by sudden elevations of mind which he cannot produce in himself, and which sometimes rise when he expects them least.”⁴

Johnson believed that intellectual preparation was the most effective way to break through his intermittent writer’s block. He had grown up with books, and had spent years cataloguing Sir Robert Harley’s 13,000-volume library. He took notes on books he read and enjoyed intense discussions with learned and lively friends. Once he got started, Johnson, whose head was stocked with books and mind full of ideas, could compose quickly. “When a man writes from his own mind,” Johnson said, “he writes very rapidly. The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent in reading, in order to write: a man will turn over half a library to make one book.” Just as the writer may be struck by a happy inspiration during the process of writing, so he may get ideas from saturating himself in books. Using a botanical metaphor in Rambler 184, Johnson explained how reading could inspire a thought, which he would turn around in his mind and eventually put down on paper: “A careless glance upon a favorite author . . . is sufficient to supply the first hint or seminal idea, which enlarged by the gradual accretion of matter stored in the mind, is by the warmth of fancy easily expanded into flowers, and sometimes ripened into fruit.”⁵ Though getting started could be torture, he clearly enjoyed the preparatory process of reading and thinking.

Focusing directly on the problem of composition, he drew on his own experience when advising a young clergyman how to write and edit. First, Johnson said, when faced with a blank page, he should concentrate on getting his ideas down on paper without worrying about the precise order or exact expression. Then, with concrete words to work on, he should revise until he achieves the desired form. The miraculous creation of something out of nothing would give him the necessary confidence to continue: “in the labour of composition do not burden your mind with too much at once, do not exact from yourself at one effort of excogitation, propriety of thought and elegance of expression. Invent first and then embellish. The production of something where nothing was before, is an act of greater energy, than the expansion or decoration of the thing produced.” Johnson told another young divine to compose in haste and revise at leisure: “I would say . . . ‘Here is your [biblical] text; let me see how soon you can make a sermon.’ Then I’d say, ‘Let me see how much better you can make it.’” Johnson also warned against being seduced by the cant phrase and the fashionable word. Writers should be critical of their own work and strive for precision: “Read over your compositions, and where ever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.”⁶

Johnson knew he had a limited impulse to work. More a sprinter than a long-distance runner, he broke down his major works into brief, manageable sections. As he said of the Earl of Rochester, “his pieces are commonly short, such as one fit of resolution would produce.” He was able to take on potentially overwhelming projects like the Dictionary, the Rambler, the edition of Shakespeare and The Lives of the Poets, which took many years to complete, by building them up from individual words, short essays, separate plays and brief biographies.

In practice, Johnson did not follow his own excellent recommendations. He not only wrote with extraordinary speed, but seldom revised, or even reread, his apparently polished prose. He became so expert that he often produced his articles and essays under pressure and at the last minute, as the printer’s boy stood ready for copy. During his sudden shifts from paralytic indolence to frenzied bouts of creativity, he followed the examples of both John Milton and Alexander Pope. Like Milton, he “composed as many lines as his memory would conveniently retain” before actually writing them down. Like Pope, he wrote in the first white heat of concentrated activity. Pope recalled, “the things that I have written fastest have always pleased me most. I wrote the Essay on Criticism fast... The Rape of the Lock was written fast... I wrote most of the [translation of] The Iliad fast.” Johnson’s friend Thomas Percy, the collector of traditional ballads, explained Johnson’s method: “[He] used to revolve the subject in his mind, and turn and form every period, till he had brought the whole to the highest correctness and the most perfect arrangement. Then his uncommonly retentive memory enabled him to deliver a whole essay, properly finished, whenever it was called for.”⁷

Ironically, in view of his obsession with idleness and procrastination, Johnson wrote faster than any other major writer in English and sometimes produced as many as 12,000 words, or about 30 printed pages, in one sitting. At Oxford, in 1729, he translated into Latin the 108 lines of Pope’s Messiah in one afternoon and the next morning. From 1740 to 1743 he invented the elaborate arguments and extended rejoinders of the Debates in Parliament—based solely on another man’s brief notes on what the speakers had said—and wrote them down even faster than most men could transcribe the words. His heroic feats were legendary. John Nichols reported that Johnson, like a racehorse shooting out of the starting gate, often turned out “three columns of the [Gentleman’s] Magazine within the hour. He once wrote ten small-print, double-columned pages in one day, and that not a long one, beginning perhaps at noon, and ending early in the evening.” Since a column had about 600 words, this amounted to about 1,800 words an hour, 30 words a minute or one elegant word every two seconds.

Johnson translated from French six sheets, or 48 quarto pages, of Jean Pierre de Crousaz’s Commentary on Pope’s Essay on Man in one day. Since he rarely got up before noon, he often wrote by candlelight at night. He also composed in one sitting 48 octavo, or 24 quarto, pages of his great Life of Richard Savage (1744), staying up all night to do it, and prided himself on completing the 180 pages in a total of thirty-six hours. In one night he turned out his 5,000-word fable, The Vision of Theodore, the Hermit of Teneriffe (1748)—which he, but no one else, thought the best thing he ever wrote—after a convivial evening with friends in Holborn. He composed the first 70 lines (or even the first 100, according to another source) of his finest poem, The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749), in one morning, and had thought out the entire poem before putting a single couplet on paper. This titanic achievement seemed to belie his firm conviction that all human wishes were vain.

Between 1750 and 1752 he turned out regular copy on a journalistic treadmill. Twice a week and single-handedly he wrote the essays that made up the Rambler. In the final number he mournfully listed the difficulties he’d struggled to overcome. “He that condemns himself to compose on a stated day,” he observed, “will often bring to his task an attention dissipated, a memory embarrassed, an imagination overwhelmed, a mind distracted with anxieties, a body languishing with disease.” Despite these impediments, Johnson faithfully produced nearly all the 208 Ramblers “in haste, as the moment pressed, without even being read over by him before they were printed.” He often wrote the 1,000 words (or 2 I/2printed pages) of the Idler, a lighter sequel to the Rambler, with equal velocity. Told that the post would leave in half an hour, he exclaimed, “then we shall do very well,” and instantly sat down and dashed it off.⁸

Johnson didn’t seem to be troubled by anxiety when he wrote for someone else. He wrote twenty-seven sermons—most of them for his schoolboy friend the worldly lawyer and cleric John Taylor—tossing one off after a hearty dinner and posting it that night. He famously composed his Oriental fable Rasselas (1759) in the evenings of one week to pay for his mother’s funeral. The political pamphlets of the 1770s, published toward the end of his life, were written with the same polish and panache. Proudly, even boastfully noting the exact day and time, he said The False Alarm (1770; 27 printed pages), an attack on the radical MP John Wilkes, was started at the Thrales’ house at 8 PM on Wednesday and finished, 16 hours later, at noon on Thursday. He wrote The Patriot (1774; 11 pages), another attack on Wilkes, in a similarly expeditious fashion. His friends called for the pamphlet on a Friday and he completed it the following day. Taxation No Tyranny (1775; 44 pages), his attack on the American rebels, was, in a more leisurely fashion, knocked off within a week. The book-length, 165-page Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775), based on letters sent to Hester Thrale, he wrote up as a diary in only 20 days.

Even when he was turning out enormous amounts of work and had become a respected man of letters, Johnson still felt he had not done enough. Despite his phenomenal output, he reproached himself for idleness. In his diary of April 1775 he revealed his anxiety and guilt: “When I look back upon resolutions of improvement and amendments, which year after year have been made and broken, either by negligence, forgetfulness, vicious idleness, casual interruption, or morbid infirmity, I find that so much of my life has stolen unprofitably away, and that I can descry by retrospection scarcely a few single days properly and vigorously employed.”⁹ Success could never assuage these feelings, because he was caught in a vicious circle: writing was hard work, and his efforts might come to nothing. This was bad enough, but success could also tempt him to laziness and complacency, and make him lose all he had gained: “labour and care are rewarded with success, success produces confidence, confidence relaxes industry, and negligence ruins that reputation which accuracy had raised.”¹⁰ Just as he always feared for his spiritual salvation, so he doubted that anything he wrote would fulfill his own high standards. Being a writer meant being in a state of constant vigilance and constant striving. For Johnson, writing well was a moral imperative and a lifelong struggle.

II

Johnson began his literary career with a weight of learning, and he brought an authoritative intellectual power to all his assertions and arguments. He believed that a man of letters could write about anything—poetry, history, science, travel—and that “heroes in literature” were obliged to “enlarge the boundaries of knowledge by discovering and conquering new regions of the intellectual world.” They must use this new knowledge to build on and enhance the literary achievements of the past: “He that wishes to be counted among the benefactors of posterity, must add by his own toil to the acquisitions of his ancestors and secure his memory from neglect by some valuable improvement.”

Johnson followed a traditional path when he began as a writer. He translated several works from French, and in his first major poem imitated Juvenal’s Latin verse. But he believed that poets, who developed and sustained the language, were supreme. He confessed that translators had a much lower status, that “no man ever grew immortal by a translation” and that “no man was ever great by imitation.”¹¹ Though he enthusiastically praised John Dryden’s Virgil and Pope’s Homer, he was, paradoxically, sceptical about translating poetry and told Boswell: “You may translate books of science exactly. You may also translate history, in so far as it is not embellished with oratory, which is poetical. Poetry, indeed, cannot be translated; and, therefore, it is the poets that preserve languages; for we would not be at the trouble to learn a language, if we could have all that is written in it just as well in a translation.”

In the spring of 1734, while still idling in Lichfield and thrashing around for a subject, Johnson had planned to edit the Latin poems of Angelo Poliziano (1454-94), known as Politian. Always interested in learned Renaissance humanists, he was attracted to the man who wrote poems in Greek, Latin and Italian, and was closely associated with the Medici dynasty in Florence. On June 15, 1734, a friend borrowed from Pembroke College library, “for the use of Mr. Johnson,” Angeli Politiani Opera. Johnson never returned this book to the college, and it was found in his library after his death. On August 5 he issued a proposal and solicited advance subscriptions for his edition, to guarantee a number of buyers and defray the costs of publication. He planned to include a life of the author, notes on the poems and a history of Latin poetry from Petrarch (whose work he’d discovered in his father’s bookshop) to Politian. But the response was tepid, and he was forced to abandon the project.

Johnson was able to persuade publishers to commission translations of what then appeared to be promising, salable books by Lobo (1735), Paolo Sarpi (1738) and Crousaz (1739), but which now seem extremely obscure (even for a university press). In a letter to Cave of July 1737, Johnson suggested a translation from two languages of the text and notes of Father Paolo Sarpi’s History of the Council of Trent (1619), which has been called “the last great monument of Italian Renaissance historiography.” The book, Johnson wrote, had in 1736 “been translated into French, and published with large Notes by Dr. [Pierre-François] Le Courayer. The Reputation of that Book is so much revived in England, that it is presumed, a new translation of it from the Italian, together with Le Courayer’s Notes from the French, could not fail of a favourable Reception.”

The Council of Trent (1545-63) took place after the Lutheran Reformation and attempted to reform the Catholic Church under Jesuit guidance. Since Sarpi was a highly respected scientist and priest, his opposition to papal authority, especially to the pope’s political encroachment on the independence of Italian city-states, was then of considerable interest to English Protestants. Cave was responsive to Johnson’s proposal. In August 1738, a year after Johnson’s letter, Cave printed 6,000 copies of the proposal and began paying him for chapters of the slow-moving translation. That month, Johnson, adopting an unusually deferential tone, tried to reassure his employer, who had not been receiving copy for cash: “As to Father Paul, I have not yet been just to my proposal, but have met with impediments which, I hope, are now at an end, and if you find the Progress hereafter not such as You have a right to expect, You can easily stimulate a negligent Translator.” A rival translator (and there always seems to be a rival for any project a writer undertakes) objected to his proposal. Faced with considerable opposition, Johnson gave it up, and the rival (as so often happens) never completed his own translation.

Johnson never published his projected life of Politian, but he did rescue part of his aborted project by bringing out a brief life of Sarpi. Like all his brief lives, his “Sarpi” was a translation, paraphrase and synopsis of a previous biography—in this case, by Le Courayer. In many of his early lives he identified with his distinguished subject. Johnson—who had prodigious powers of recollection and, as a small child, had astonished his mother by instantly memorizing a passage from the prayer book—wrote that Sarpi “was born for study, having ... a memory so tenacious, that he could repeat thirty verses upon once hearing them.” Praising both Sarpi and his History, he stated that the priest was “hated by the Romans as their most formidable enemy, and honoured by all the learned for his abilities, and by the good for his integrity,” that his book was “unequalled for the judicious disposition of the matter, and artful texture of the narration, commended by Dr. [Gilbert] Burnet as the completest model of historical writing.”¹²

In his life of Pope, Johnson expressed admiration for the learning of Crousaz, a professor at the University of Lausanne, and respect for his orthodox religious beliefs: “Crousaz was a professor of Switzerland, eminent for his treatise of Logick, and his Examen de Pyrrhonisme [Extreme Scepticism], and, however little known or regarded here, was no mean antagonist... His incessant vigilance for the promotion of piety disposed him to look with distrust upon all metaphysical systems of Theology, and all schemes of virtue and happiness purely rational.”

Crousaz, a mathematician and philosopher, wrote a Commentary on Mr. Pope’s Principles of Morality (1738), which Johnson translated. But Crousaz did not know English, and had based his ill-informed book on French translations, in verse and prose, of Pope’s popular poem An Essay on Man (1734). Pope believed in the basic goodness of the universe and the rightness of man’s place in it, and expressed his doctrine of cosmic optimism in the line: “Whatever is, is right.” Crousaz attacked Pope for “all the newer secular speculations that seemed to him to impugn traditional orthodoxies about God’s and man’s free will.” Johnson did not try to justify Pope’s naïvely optimistic philosophy, but in the footnotes to the text he defended him from Crousaz’s attacks on passages that were not in the poem itself: “If he had no Way of distinguishing between Mr. Pope and his Translator, to throw the Odium of Impiety, and the Ridicule of Nonsense entirely on the former, is at least stabbing in the Dark, and wounding, for ought he knows, an innocent Character.” Pope’s biographer observed that Crousaz “devoted much of his attention to criticizing expressions nowhere to be found in Pope’s English and assailing propositions that his victim would have found as unacceptable as he.” As Pope, satirizing such misguided commentators, wrote in his Essay on Criticism (1711): “These leave the Sense, their Learning to display, / And those explain the Meaning quite away.”

Though Johnson earned very little from his translations, he always remained interested in such projects. In the last year of his life, he considered translating Jacques-Auguste Thuanus (1553-1617), the French statesman, historian and author of Historia sui Temporis (History of His Own Time). When John Nichols said this would be a tough job, Johnson insouciantly replied, “I should have no trouble but that of dictation, which would be performed as speedily as an amanuensis could write.”¹³

After translating Crousaz, Johnson concentrated on biography. Beginning with the life of Sarpi, he published eight brief lives in Cave’s Gentleman’s Magazine between 1738 and 1742: on the English privateer Sir Francis Drake and the English admiral Robert Blake, the Dutch physician Herman Boerhaave, the German scholar John Philip Barretier, the French botanist Louis Morin, the Dutch classicist Peter Burman and the English doctor Thomas Sydenham. These rather random and derivative lives have little historical value, but Johnson’s personal comments reflect his interest in war, philology, medicine and science, and his attempt to interpret the military and cultural history of the previous centuries.

The life of Drake is a vivid narrative of his voyage in 1572-73 to Panama and the edge of the Pacific Ocean, and of his circumnavigation of the world in 1580. Admiral Blake had defeated Maarten Tromp in the First Dutch War (1652-54) and shattered Holland’s supremacy at sea. The patriotic motive for publishing these two lives in 1740 “was to compare the glorious past naval history of England with the disastrous efforts of Admiral [Edward] Vernon.” In 1740, during the War of Jenkins’ Ear—provoked by Spanish abuse of British sailors in the West Indies—Vernon had failed miserably against the Spanish in the assault on Cartagena. The first paragraph in “Blake” connects his life to contemporary events by condemning “the insults, ravages, and barbarities” of the Spanish and by angrily calling for vengeance against them.

The life of “the learned, the judicious, the pious Boerhaave”¹⁴ (as Johnson wrote in Rambler 114) was by far the most interesting of the early biographies. Johnson saw him as a heroic model, identified with many aspects of his life—especially his agonizing illnesses, which taught him to feel compassion for others. Boerhaave became a professor of medicine at the University of Leyden in 1701, a time when the Dutch were admired for their tolerance and enlightenment, and when many Scots, including Boswell, went abroad to study Roman law at Utrecht.

Johnson often seemed to be writing about himself (or foreshadowing his own future) when discussing his subject. He described Boerhaave as “tall and strong, and remarkable for extraordinary strength . . . formed by nature for great designs, and guided by religion in the exertion of his abilities.” Keith Crook has pointed out that when translating from his Latin source, Johnson—deeply interested, like Boerhaave, in scientific experiments—heated up the prose: “Chemiam dies noctesque exercuit [he practiced chemistry day and night] became ‘His insatiable curiosity after knowledge engaged him now in the practice of chemistry, which he prosecuted with all the ardour of a philosopher.’” Just as Boerhaave “was one of those mighty capacities to whom scarce anything seems impossible,” so Johnson would also be capable of undertaking, almost single-handedly, monumental projects like the Dictionary of the English Language. In a magnificent conclusion, Johnson observed, “he was an admirable example of temperance, fortitude, humility, and devotion. His piety, and a religious sense of his dependence on God, was the basis of all his virtues, and the principle of his whole conduct.”¹⁵ In this passage Johnson revealed his own character and aspirations, and projected his own future ambitions.

III

All Johnson’s apprentice efforts were based on well-known sources. He translated and adapted lives from previous biographies, and took the story of Irene from a history of the Turks. His first major poem was an imitation of the Third Satire of the Latin poet Juvenal, a xenophobic attack on the pernicious influence of Greeks and Jews in ancient Rome. Lobo’s book took place in Abyssinia, Irene in Turkey; Johnson’s London (1738) described the danger, violence and corruption that took place in the English capital as well as in these Eastern despotisms.

Juvenal’s major themes were the vileness of the city, the contrast between rich and poor, and the corrupt foreigners who were ruining the honest Romans. His narrator exclaims that it’s impossible for a decent man to remain in Rome, that it’s no longer worth living in a city where the jerrybuilt houses are dangerous and the traffic intolerable. Finally, he bids farewell to Rome and to the friend who’s come to say good-bye, and leaves to enjoy a quiet existence in the country. According to Moses Hadas, Juvenal “incidentally provides a lively picture of the teeming life of the capital—its sights and sounds, dangers and annoyances, luxury and meanness, and empty social observances.”

The classicist Gilbert Highet noted that such attacks on the vileness of the city went back to the biblical Sodom and Gomorrah and to Babylon. Since ancient times writers have believed that people in the country are exceptionally virtuous and commonsensical, while those in the city are immoral and corrupt. English authors in the first half of the eighteenth century—the self-consciously Augustan Age, named after the great Roman emperor and patron of Virgil, Horace and Ovid—saw many parallels between Rome and London.

Johnson knew Juvenal through his close study of the poet, through previous translations and imitations, and through scholarly explications in the main editions. Viewing him as both a moralist and a wit, Johnson said, “the peculiarity of Juvenal is a mixture of gaiety and stateliness, of pointed sentences [i.e., sharp epigrams] and declamatory grandeur.” Boswell mentioned that Johnson found some of the satires “too gross for imitation,” but he was drawn to the Third Satire, which afforded striking comparisons between the ancient and modern cities. Niall Rudd, comparing Juvenal and Johnson, observed, “Johnson has expanded the opening scene, the first part of the speaker’s diatribe, and the later picture of the countryside, whereas he has shortened the woes of poverty and the dangers of city life.”¹⁶

Johnson was of course familiar with the fine translation of Juvenal’s Third Satire—also in closed couplets—that Dryden had made as a schoolboy, but there were no exact parallels between his work and Johnson’s. In a charming passage on the advantages of country life, Juvenal wrote:

Est aliquid, quocunque loco, quocunque recessu,
Unius sese dominum fecisse lacertae.

In Dryden’s version this becomes:

’Tis somewhat to be lord of some small ground,
In which a lizard may, at least, turn round.

Johnson’s version omits the lizard and is far more satiric. He emphasizes the venal politician, caught red-handed and forced to give up his rural retreat, and the squalid urban cellars in which poor writers are condemned to live:

There might’st thou find some elegant Retreat,
Some hireling Senator’s deserted Seat,
And stretch thy Prospects o’er the smiling Land,
For less than rent the Dungeons of the Strand.

Describing the dangers of collapsing and burning houses, Dryden wrote, in a triplet prolonged by an elegant alexandrine:

What scene so desart, or so full of fright,
As tow’ring houses tumbling in the night,
And Rome on fire beheld by its own blazing light?

Johnson is again more savage and severe, introducing other perils and an apparently incongruous female atheist, who pointedly connects physical with spiritual death:

Here Malice, Rapine, Accident, conspire,
And now a Rabble rages, now a Fire;
Their Ambush here relentless Ruffians lay,
And here the fell Attorney prowls for Prey;
Here falling Houses thunder on your Head,
And here a female Atheist talks you dead.¹⁷

Johnson emphasizes the constant danger of being attacked in the street, and condemns the breed of rapacious lawyers who trap innocent and unsuspecting clients.

Unlike Dryden, Johnson chose to imitate rather than translate Juvenal. He called this “a kind of middle composition between translation and original design, which pleases when the thoughts are unexpectedly applicable, and the parallels lucky.” He told Cave that “part of the beauty of the performance (if any beauty be allow’d it) consisted in adapting Juvenal’s Sentiments to modern facts and Persons,” and printed the corresponding passages from Juvenal at the bottom of the page so that the careful reader could note these parallels.

A modern historian, writing about Hanoverian England and puzzled by Johnson’s attitude toward the city, remarked that it is strange “to find Johnson, whose love of London itself was matched only by his contempt for the barrenness of Scotland, writing: ‘For who would leave, unbrib’d, Hibernia’s Land, / Or change the rocks of Scotland for the Strand?’”¹⁸ But if Johnson had been angry first in Oxford and then when he returned to Lichfield, he was ten times angrier in London. In the city he was an outsider, hungry for sustenance and fame, poor, isolated and constantly tempted by volatile companions like Richard Savage. Johnson was undoubtedly sincere, and not just imitating Juvenal, in his attack on the vices of London. There was a great difference between his harsh view of London during the lonely, obscure and impoverished years of his youth and his enthusiastic attitude during the later years of friendship, fame and comfort. His hero Thales—named after one of the seven wise men of ancient Greece—speaks for Johnson just as Umbricius speaks for Juvenal. It’s worth noting that though Thales leaves London for Wales, Johnson’s narrator, like Juvenal’s, remains behind.

The themes of Johnson’s London are political, personal and social. He condemns the voracious greed and violent crime, the excise tax and political pensions, as well as the Italian castrati, French fashions and Spanish insolence, and he particularly attacks the Whigs’ craven policy toward Spain. His reference to Queen Elizabeth’s birthplace in Greenwich, like his patriotic lives of Drake and Blake, contrasts the military triumphs of the past with the degrading appeasement of the present:

Struck with the Seat that gave Eliza birth,
We kneel, and kiss the consecrated Earth;
In pleasing Dreams the blissful Age renew,
And call Britannia’s Glories back to view.

He took up the same themes in his essay “Thoughts on Agriculture,” written sixteen years later in 1754. He again contrasted the morals of country and city, and raged against the “luxury, avarice, injustice, violence, and ambition, that take up their ordinary residence in populous cities; while the hard and laborious life of the husbandman will not admit of these vices.”

In Rambler 166 Johnson returned to the most personal theme in London, his work as a Grub Street galley slave, and asserted, “no complaint has been more frequently repeated in all ages than that of the neglect of merit associated with poverty.” He draws attention to this idea in the most personal couplet of the poem: “This mournful Truth is ev’ry where confest, / Slow rises Worth, by Poverty deprest.”¹⁹

Johnson’s poem substantiates a social historian’s assertion that “the dominating impression of life in eighteenth-century London, from the standpoint of the individual, is one of uncertainty and insecurity.” Another modern historian notes that danger prevailed in the city from the 1720s, through the time that London was published, to the late 1740s: “[Daniel] Defoe claimed in the late 1720s that in London a man was not safe going about his business even in the daytime. A peace always produced a crime wave because of the return of many discharged soldiers and sailors without employment, and after the War of Austrian Succession [1740-48] Henry Fielding likewise thought that the streets of London would shortly be impassable ‘without the utmost hazard.’” Echoing “man that is born of a woman is of few days, and full of trouble” (Job 14:1), Johnson, in Sermon 23, emphasized this sense of danger while trying to turn the minds of men from the hazards of daily existence to the eternal truths of religion: “That the life of man is unhappy, that his days are not only few, but evil, that he is surrounded by dangers, distracted by uncertainties, and oppressed by calamities, requires no proof.”²⁰

Johnson published his journalistic hack writing anonymously, and didn’t even sign London, lest his first major effort be condemned. He called authors a “genus irritabile, ‘a generation very easily put out of temper’”; but thought critics—weak and idle, ignorant and vain—were even worse. Eighteenth-century critics, unconstrained by libel laws, could be savage in their ad hominem attacks. They rejoiced in mocking Pope’s hunchbacked deformity and his pitiful attempts to have sex with prostitutes. But Johnson said he’d rather be attacked than unnoticed and felt it was worse to ignore an author than to condemn him. In a magniloquent passage in Rambler 144, he explained how “the first appearance of excellence unites multitudes against it” and provokes “the envious, the idle, the peevish, and the thoughtless, to [attack vulnerable authors] and obstruct that worth which they cannot equal”:

What caution is sufficient to ward off the blows of invisible assailants, or what force can stand against unintermitted attacks?... No sooner can any man emerge from the crowd and fix the eyes of the publick upon him, than he stands as a mark to the arrows of lurking calumny, and receives, in the tumult of hostility, from distant and from nameless hands, wounds not always easy to be cured.²¹

London was, in fact, well received by Johnson’s fellow poets. Thomas Gray called it “one of those few imitations, that have all the ease and all the spirit of an original.” Later on, in the Victorian Age, Lord Tennyson claimed, “the ‘high moral tone’ of some of its couplets had never been surpassed in English satire.” The most precious praise came from Pope, whose couplets Johnson had imitated in London (“And now a Rabble rages, now a Fire”). More severely handicapped than Johnson, Pope as a Catholic could not earn a university degree or practice a profession. Pope had admired Johnson’s Latin translation of his Messiah, and probably knew about Johnson’s defense of his Essay on Man. He now recognized new talent and generously predicted that “the author [of London], whoever he is, will not long be concealed.”²²

IV

In the fall of 1737, about six months before the publication of his poem, Johnson returned to Lichfield and, leaving the twenty-two-year-old Lucy Porter with relatives in the country, brought Tetty to London. They found lodgings, superior to his bachelor digs, in Castle Street, near Cavendish Square, in the more fashionable western part of town. By now Tetty’s fortune was nearly exhausted. Johnson had earned a respectable ten guineas for London, but he couldn’t produce a major poem every week and still hadn’t found a producer for his play, Irene. After the initial excitement of seeing his work, if not his name, in print and enjoying the succès d’estime of London, the thrill wore off. He feared that he wouldn’t be able to support his wife, who was used to luxury and inclined to extravagance, and would be condemned to penurious drudgery for the rest of his life.

Johnson soldiered on at the Gentleman’s Magazine for another year. But in the summer of 1739—after publishing his translation of Crousaz, his lives of Sarpi and Boerhaave, and London—he made one last effort to find a teaching job in the Midlands. Boswell wrote that “he felt the hardship of writing for bread; he was, therefore willing to resume the office of a schoolmaster, so as to have a sure, though moderate income for his life. An offer was made to him of the mastership of a school [at £60 a year], provided he could obtain the degree of Master of Arts.”

The trustees of Appleby Grammar School in Market Bosworth, thirteen miles east of Lichfield, thought Johnson was a strong candidate and wanted to hire him as headmaster. But they stuck rigidly to the rules and were not, like Sir Wolston Dixie, willing to ignore that old obstacle, his lack of a university degree. Initiating a tangled trail of influence, the trustees asked Pope to recommend him to Lord Gower, a local landowner and powerful politician. Gower wrote to an unnamed friend of Jonathan Swift, the dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin. Gower asked the friend to ask Swift to recommend the anonymously published Johnson—personally unknown to the trustees, Pope, Gower, Swift’s friend and Swift himself—for an unearned and purely cosmetic mail-order degree from the University of Dublin.

Though this was the way influence worked in the eighteenth century, there was little likelihood of success. Gower doubted whether the college authorities would be inclined to debase their degree by posting it on demand to an unknown person. But on August 1, 1739, he faithfully wrote to Swift’s friend, emphasizing Johnson’s desperation and his willingness to appear for a viva in distant Dublin. He stated that the school trustees

do me the honour to think that I have interest enough in you, to prevail upon you to write to Dean Swift, to persuade the University of Dublin to send a diploma to me, constituting this poor man Master of Arts in their University. They highly extol the man’s learning and probity; and will not be persuaded, that the University will make any difficulty of conferring such a favour upon a stranger, if he is recommended by the Dean. They say he is not afraid of the strictest examination, though he is of so long a journey; and will venture it, if the Dean thinks it necessary; choosing rather to die upon the road, than be starved to death in translating for booksellers.

Gower, mentioning yet another difficulty, said the M.A. degree from across the sea had to be granted within six weeks, by September 11, when the trustees would meet to choose the new headmaster. He then pessimistically added: “if you see this matter in the same light as it appears to me, I hope you will burn this, and pardon me for giving you so much trouble about an impracticable thing.”²³

Even if Gower’s letter was not burned and eventually reached Swift, and there is no proof that it did, he was in no position to help Johnson. Johnson later wrote in his life of Swift that as a student at Trinity College, Dublin, Swift himself had been found “conspicuously deficient” by the examiners and had obtained his bachelor’s degree “at last by special favour, a term used in that university to denote want of merit... It is easy to imagine that the mode in which his first degree was conferred left him no great fondness for the University.” A modern authority on Irish universities noted that Trinity College reciprocated Swift’s animosity: “Trinity College was one of the few public institutions in Ireland which made no effort to honour itself by honouring Dean Swift. There is no indication that he was ever popular within its walls until after his death.”

Moreover, as the editor of Swift’s letters wrote, he had no power or influence in the university at that time. In May 1730, when the Duke of Dorset had succeeded Swift’s friend Lord Carteret as lord lieutenant, Swift wrote frankly to Pope that he could “anticipate the loss of the little influence remaining” to him. In any case, the editor added, “it would have been impossible for Swift, in the time at his disposal, to obtain what was requested.”²⁴ The final irony was that since the Appleby school required a master of arts degree from Oxford or Cambridge, the Dublin degree, even if obtained, would not have qualified Johnson for the position he sought. Since he believed that Swift had refused to act on his behalf, Johnson remained hostile to the dean throughout his life and roundly condemned him in The Lives of the Poets.

A. L. Reade, attempting to account for Johnson’s intense dislike, concluded, “even if Swift really was approached, and declined to help, and his refusal became known to Johnson (a rather long chain of assumptions), it is hard to believe that lasting enmity would have resulted.” Boswell seemed to confirm this by recording, “I once took the liberty to ask him if Swift had personally offended him, and he told me he had not.” Despite this testimony, Johnson remained virulently hostile to both Gower and Swift. Unaware of Gower’s letter and embittered by his failure to get the job at Appleby, he took revenge when writing the Dictionary. He told Boswell, “when I came to the word Renegado, after telling that it meant ‘one who deserts to the enemy, a revolter,’ I added, Sometimes we say a GOWER. Thus it went to press; but the printer had more wit than I, and struck it out.”²⁵ If Johnson was angry with Gower, he must also have been angry with Swift. Like the school trustees, he mistakenly believed that Swift had the power to get him the Dublin M.A. and that the university would surely have conferred the degree if Swift had recommended him.

From the beginning of his adult life Johnson had struggled against a series of humiliating failures. Now, despite all his hard work for Cave and the success of London, he seemed destined for a life of starvation, slaving away for the booksellers.